My Dearest Children, Hortense and William,
I have entrusted this letter to my good friend Gertie McCartney, known infamously and variously on the western prairies as “Dirty Gertie” or “Jimmy the Muleskinner.” I do not know if this will ever reach you. And if it does, I do not know if you will ever read it. In this way, I feel that sending this letter is much like putting it into a bottle and throwing it into this great sea of grass, all the while hoping desperately that it will wash up one day on your shores.
Even more fervently than that wild hope, I hope and pray daily that you are both well, and that we shall all be soon reunited. I have neither time nor space here to tell you of all that has happened. I am keeping a detailed journal of my journey here so that you may one day know the full story of your mother’s life. I can only day now, briefly, that I was unjustly taken from you and committed to an asylum. My love for your father, Harry Ames, was deemed to be my “madness”—of which you are both the cherished result. For that I have no regrets on any score. I do not know what bad become of your father. Only perhaps your grandfather can explain this to you—if he bad the courage.
Presently I am living on the western prairies with a band of Cheyenne Indians … oh, dear, how insane that must seem to you … I am married to a man named Little Wolf, a great leader of his people … Good God, perhaps this letter is not such a good idea, after all, and will only confirm in your minds that your mother is, indeed, “crazy as a hoot owl,” as my friend Gertie would put it. Well, too late for such worries … I am with child by Little Wolf, and will give birth to your brother or sister next winter. There are others with me here—by that I mean, other white women. We are members of an important government program, of which you will one day learn. I hope then that you will be very proud of your mother. I cannot here day more.
Please know that you are both kept close to my heart, that not a moment passes when I do not think of you, or long to hold you again in my arms. One day soon I will do so—I will come back to you, I promise you that, my dears. Every fiber of my being lives only toward that end.
Please remember me as your loving mother,
May Dodd
Harold Wild Plums was blind but still keen of mind and his granddaughter, May, read him the letter as I sat on the edge of his ratty, stained sofa. Hearing it read out loud, I understood again how “going West to live with Indians” had become the euphemism it had in our family for insanity. It was a tale for impressionable children, and I think possibly my brother Jimmy and I alone in the family ever actually believed it.
But all I could think of now looking around this bleak concrete block house, a child of privilege myself, was how far away I was from my own world, and how far away my great grandmother must have felt on these prairies. And it was then that I suddenly knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that the story was true.
Harold smiled as the letter was read to him, and nodded. “Yes,” he said when she had finished, “those are grandmother’s words. Do you recognize her handwriting, May?”
May was an attractive woman in her late thirties. “Yes, Grandfather,” she said. “It is the same handwriting as the journals, and the same paper. I’ll bet I can find the very page where it was torn out.”
“You’ve got the journals?” I asked in a low voice of wonder.
“May, go and fetch Grandmother’s journals from the Sweet Medicine bundle,” Harold said to his granddaughter. “Our guest is a relative. He is the grandson of my mother’s half brother, Willie. He has finally found us.” And then to me Harold looked with his milky blind eyes. “I often thought over the years of searching for my white family,” Harold said. And he shrugged. “But I was very busy with other matters. Does your grandfather, William, still live?”
“He died of cancer over thirty years ago,” I said.
“Ah, yes,” Harold said, nodding thoughtfully. “My mother, Wren, also died of the cancer when she was too young. I do not know why I have lived as long as I have. Perhaps to give you these papers now. That’s what Father Anthony would have said.” And Harold smiled. “Father Anthony would have said that I am blessed to give you these journals.”
At that moment, May came back into the room carrying a stack of old cracked leather-bound notebooks, tied together in a bundle by rawhide thongs.
“Yes, perhaps you would be interested in reading these journals, Will Dodd,” Harold said to me.
And very carefully May Swallow Wild Plums placed the bundle in my hands, and with long graceful fingers untied the thongs that bound it.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
In spite of efforts to convince the reader to the contrary, this book is entirely a work of fiction. However, the seed that grew into a novel was sown in the author’s imagination by an actual historical event: in 1854 at a peace conference at Fort Laramie, a prominent Northern Cheyenne chief requested of the U.S. Army authorities the gift of one thousand white women as brides for his young warriors. Because theirs is a matrilineal society in which all children born belong to their mother’s tribe, this seemed to the Cheyennes to be the perfect means of assimilation into the white man’s world—a terrifying new world that even as early as 1854, the Native Americans clearly recognized held no place for them. Needless to say, the Cheyennes’ request was not well received by the white authorities—the peace conference collapsed, the Cheyennes went home, and, of course, the white women did not come. In this novel they do.
Certain other historical events are here rendered, but in an entirely fictitious manner. At the same time, the real names of certain actual historical figures are used in this novel, but the characters themselves are fictional creations. In all other respects this book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, dates, geographical descriptions are all either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or to actual events or locales is entirely coincidental.
Finally, while a genuine attempt was made to render the Cheyenne language as accurately as possible, certain misspellings and misuses inevitably occur in this book. For these errors, the author offers sincere apologies to the Cheyenne people.
“Fergus is gifted in his ability to portray the perceptions and emotions of women. He writes with tremendous insight and sensitivity about the individual community and the political and religious issues of the time, many of which are still relevant today. This book is artistically rendered with meticulous attention to small details that bring to life the daily concerns of a group of hardy souls at a pivotal time in U.S. history.”
—Booklist
“[May] and the other brides rise from the underbelly of society, becoming the most noble characters in this imaginative tale of the American West reeling under the decline of one culture and the forcible ascent of another.”
—Publishers Weekly
“In a word, One Thousand White Women is terrific! What Jim Fergus has done within these pages is give life and voice to an aspect of the American West and its native peoples that has been, if not covered up, too long overlooked. It is a tremendous achievement by a remarkable writer.”
—David Seybold, editor of Boats and Fathers and Sons
“One Thousand White Women is definitely a fresh twist on the traditional Western. Fergus has started his career as a novelist with a book rich in the results of personal fervor and study, and one that reflects a sensitive imagination. Fans of Western fiction and students of American frontier history can confidently add this novel to their summer reading list.”
—San Antonio Express News
“Jim Fergus’s powerful first novel is a surefire winner. I read it non-stop and would now like to propose a hundred-year moratorium on all books about white women in the Old West, since it will take the rest of us at least that long to amass the research—not to mention the compassion—needed to equal this fine work. A masterful job!”
—Robert F. Jones, author of Tie My Bones to Her Back
“This is a rich, beautif
ully conceived, rollicking novel, literally bursting with original characters and with the profound joy and heartbreak of the real history of the American West. May Dodd may be the most compellingly alive fictional character of that history since Little Big Man.”
—Charles Gaines, author of A Family Place, Stay Hungry, Pumping Iron, and Survival Games
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
In researching and writing this novel, the author gratefully acknowledges valuable insights and information gained from the following works:
Charles L. Blockson. The Underground Railroad: Dramatic Firsthand Accounts of Daring Escapes to Freedom (1987).
John G. Bourke. On the Border with Crook (1891).
W. P. Clark. The Indian Sign Language, with Brief Explanatory Notes of the Gestures Taught Deaf-Mutes in Our Institutions for Their Instruction, and a Description of Some of the Peculiar Laws, Customs, Myths, Superstitions, Ways of Living, Code of Peace and War Signals of Our Aborigines (1885).
William Cronon. Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (1991).
Thomas W. Dunlay. Wolves for the Blue Soldiers: Indian Scouts and Auxiliaries with the United States Army, 1860—90 (1982).
Jeffrey L. Geller and Maxine Harris. Women of the Asylum: Voices from Behind the Walls 1840—1945 (1994).
Brigitte Georgi-Findlay. The Frontiers of Women’s Writing: Women’s Narratives and the Rhetoric of Westward Expansion (1996).
Josephine Stands In Timber Glenmore and Wayne Leman. Cheyenne Topical Dictionary (1984).
Gloria Davis Goode. “Get on Board and Tell Your Story,” from Jump Up and Say: A Collection of Black Storytelling, Linda Goss and Clay Goss (1995).
George Bird Grinnell. The Cheyenne Indians, 2 Vols. (1925).
———. The Fighting Cheyennes (1915).
———.By Cheyenne Campfires (1926).
E. Adamson Hoebel. The Cheyennes: Indians of the Great Plains (1960).
Robert H. Keller, Jr. American Protestantism and United States Indian Policy, 1869—82 (1983).
John Stands in Timber/Margot Liberty. Cheyenne Memories (1967).
Thomas B. Marquis. Wooden Leg: A Warrior Who Fought Custer (1931).
Joseph C. Porter. Paper Medicine Man: John Gregory Bourke and His American West (1986).
Peter J. Powell. Sweet Medicine: The Continuing Role of the Sacred Arrows, the Sun Dance, and the Sacred Buffalo Hat in Northern Cheyenne History, 2 vols. (1969).
Glenda Riley. Women and Indians on the Frontier, 1825—1915 (1984).
Mari Sandoz. Cheyenne Autumn (1953).
Frank N. Schubert. Outpost of the Sioux Wars: A History of Fort Robinson (1993).
R. B. Stratton. Captivity of the Oatman Girls (1875).
Robert Wooster. The Military & United States Indian Policy, 1865—1903 (1988).
ONE THOUSAND WHITE WOMEN. Copyright © 1998 by Jim Fergus. All rights reserved.
For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y 10010.
Bird drawings by Loren G. Smith
eISBN 9781429938846
First eBook Edition : January 2011
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Fergus, Jim
One thousand white women : the journals of May Dodd / Jim Fergus.—1st St. Martin’s Griffin ed. p. cm.
ISBN 0-312-18008-X (hc)
ISBN 0-312-19943-0 (pbk)
1. Cheyenne Indians—Fiction. I. Title. PS3556.E66054 1998 813’.54—dc21
Jim Fergus, One Thousand White Women: The Journals of May Dodd
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